Twitter will let you see your tweets in chronological order again

Twitter announced on Monday that it will give users the option to structure their timelines chronologically by opting out of “Show the best Tweets first.”

Reverse chronological order used to be the default format on Twitter’s timeline, but it was changed in 2016.

Twitter cites user feedback as the reason for the change, and it coincides with a viral tweet that suggested a way to game Twitter’s “mute words” function to effectively create a chronological timeline.

It said that it is working on creating an easily accessible switch that would allow people to instantly switch between an algorithmic or chronological timeline, but that in the meantime users can deselect the “Show the best Tweets first” setting to achieve this effect.

4/ So, we’re working on providing you with an easily accessible way to switch between a timeline of Tweets that are most relevant for you and a timeline of the latest Tweets. You’ll see us test this in the coming weeks.

5/ Meanwhile, today we updated the “Show the best Tweets first” setting. When off, you’ll only see Tweets from people you follow in reverse chronological order. Previously when turned off, you’d also see “In case you missed it” and recommended Tweets from people you don’t follow.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted about the change, explaining that it would not show “in case you missed it” or liked tweets from accounts users follow.

???? if you turn off timeline ranking in settings today, you’ll see all the tweets from people you follow in reverse chronological order…no “in case you missed it” or tweets the people you follow “liked”. https://t.co/F9qOg9aC22

This coincides with a piece of advice tweeted by game developer Emma Kinema on Sunday. She said people could use “muted words” as a backdoor to structure their timelines chronologically. The tweet went reasonably viral, with over 18,00 retweets and almost 48,000 likes at the time of writing.

Uh. Muting suggest_recycled_tweet_inline and suggest_activity_tweet actually has fixed my timeline. It's all chronological and there are barely any "x and y liked" tweets. pic.twitter.com/Dva6LPQyLF